Month / August 2017

Over the last few days we’ve been busy in the garden setting up a new project, which is to grow veg in straw bales. This is a tried and tested method that is growing in popularity owing to it’s simplicity as well as the fact that you can get quite high yields from a small space using less water than in a conventional garden. They’re no good for annual crops, like strawberries or asparagus, as new bales are needed each year, but they’re great for pretty much everything else.

As we are short on space and on water, we decided to give it a go. It’s essentially a hydroponics system using straw as the growing medium. As the plants are watered, the straw retains the water as well as releasing nitrogen and generating heat as it decomposes. As well as being super-efficient the method also claims to extend the growing season. Obviously, James is very excited about our gardening experiment and has been initiating DD in the ways of the straw bale. We hope to build our house with these some day (soon?) and, if this all goes well, we’ll be building our veggie patch with them too!

And today I grabbed a few minutes, while DS was pottering around kicking fallen figs down the road, to sort out the seed box (bagging seeds packets by planting month) and sewing some spinach, lamb’s lettuce, radishes and lettuces seeds in the conventional patch, which is now covered up with the netting to try and keep both the cats and birds off. I’m interested to see how these will grow alongside our straw-bale-grown veg, which we can plant in a few days, once the bales have been conditioned, which involves watering them daily and applying a high-nitrogen fertiliser every-other day.

All good fun! All we need now are a few rainy days to break up the sunny ones and everything should grow nicely. What I really don’t need are any more days where the temperature is pushing 30, as that’s what did for my last crop of leafy veg, which we eat a lot of.

One thing we planned to do but didn’t get around to was sorting out the worm bin, which we’ve been happily chucking our waste into. They seem happy enough but James observed that it’s getting a bit soggy in there so we’ve decided to tip it all out and get the worms set up with some new bedding. That will also give us chance to find out whether our worm community has grown since we last freshened it up. If they’re happy they should have multiplied. If not, well, we’re obviously not doing so well at it and need to try harder. Lots to do!

I’ve got another post in draft about how much energy it takes to try and live in a new country and also learn the language of that country at the same time. It’ll be finished soon. For now though I wanted to write a quick post about where I am with my language learning journey, keeping in mind that when I first came here I really only had a few basics under my belt. I could ask for coffee, say please, thank you, and see you later – and that was just about it! So where am I now and what do I need to learn next?

Well, one of the things James did to try and help me when we first got here was to write out a list of the main verbs he said he knew and used regularly. To me he sounded really competent but he assured me he was just muddling along phrasing comments and questions around a small bunch of verbs he knew well. The list was pretty intimidating at the time. I found it really hard to translate learning into usage. At first I was focussed on putting my 1,000 most commonly used French words into Anki, which meant the infinitive form of some verbs but mostly nouns and adjectives. I really struggled to see how this base would ever get me to the point where I might actually have a conversation with someone. The list got lost, we moved house, bed times got more chaotic, and I generally had more to do, which meant Anki got lost by the way side. But I also started trying to speak more, gaining confidence in a two steps forward, one back kind of way.

So to my surprise, when I found the original list James wrote for me, I was so happy to look down and realise I now now and regularly use all of those and a few more besides. Some I have a better grasp of than others mostly because I am using them more often, but on the whole I am pretty nifty in the present tense with all of them.

Here’s the list, in no particular order.

pouvoir

to can

vouloir

to want

donner

to give

aller

to go

faire

to make/to do

écouter

to hear

penser

to think

espérer

to hope

être

to be

avoir

to have

changer

to change

acheter

to buy

vendre

to sell

venir

to come

apprendre

to learn

comprendre

to understand

arranger

to arrange

demander

to ask

attendre

to wait

essayer

to try

That’s not bad at all and that’s just the list of the top of my tired head. There are others I use (demanager, partager, ecrirer, to name a few) but these are my go-tos and, miraculously, as James said, they do seem to enable me to muddle along in a basic conversation.

It’s a start. But there are so many more. We really take for granted how much language we acquire in our native tongue.

Now I can muddle by I’ve hit the point where I’m getting frustrated again. I’ve reached the limit of what I can do with what I know and need to know more – I love to chat! – so it’s time to progress again. For this I need a bunch of new verbs, of course. Every day there’s a conversation running in my head which involves updating a mental list of verbs I don’t currently know but wanted to use at some point during the day. Then there’s the verb tenses. If I’m to have any kind of meaningful discussion with anyone then I need to move out of the present tense and be able to say useful, normal things – which involves past and future tenses too.

While I’m definitely way ahead of where I started I’m really struggling to say what I want to because obviously this list is only scratching the surface. Baby steps though, and patience. If anyone had told me one year ago that today I’d be marching into the building supplies shop and asking – in French – for a plug and a breeze block (random, I know) or taking DS to creche and spending an hour there, talking (not quite chatting, but close) with his new nursery worker, I would have been very sceptical. But here I am. It’s wonderful!